Among the highlights of 1993 were the gradual disappearance of a governing old guard discredited beyond recall by charges of corruption, the consolidation of the fractious Northern League under Umberto Bossi, and electoral reforms that prepared the ground for a political change. Up and down the peninsula, a new generation of magistrates broadened the so-called Operation Clean Hands, an investigation of suspect public figures begun in Milan in February 1992 by the magistrate Antonio Di Pietro. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Di Pietro became something of a national hero as the probing reached higher levels and exposed as corrupt almost in its entirety a system of power in force since World War II. Almost a whole political class fell into disgrace, as well as industrialists and senior judges. Some 2,500 people had been fingered as the year ended, including five former prime ministers and about 200 members of Parliament. They were variously accused of having accepted illicit funds for political parties and of bribery, extortion, embezzlement, and fraud. Billions of dollars were involved, and most traditional political parties were implicated. The most tarnished turned out to be the Socialist Unity Party (PSU), which had always finished in third place in postwar elections behind the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Communists, now called the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Few of the accused stood trial, partly because of a slow-moving judiciary.

The first career ended was that of Bettino Craxi, former prime minister and pugnacious leader of the Socialists for 17 years. He resigned from the latter post in February after being accused in January of pocketing a bribe of $25 million in exchange for public works contracts, one of 20 separate charges eventually brought against him. He robustly dismissed all the charges as part of a smear campaign. His party deputy, Claudio Martelli, minister of justice for two years, also stepped down, over an alleged slush fund in Switzerland. Giorgio La Malfa, leader of the Republican Party, bowed out in February, and the chief of the small Liberal Party, Renato Altissimo, resigned in March, the month in which prison officers complained of a lack of space for the many without clean hands. In May Franco Nobili was arrested; he had been head of the state holding company IRI, which controlled most public-sector industries. In October the general manager of the automobile manufacturer Fiat, Cesare Romiti, came under scrutiny, as did Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Olivetti.

A month earlier, Diego Curto, the deputy chief judge on the Milan civil bench and a prolific author, had become the first sitting judge to be actually jailed (in Brescia), for his confessed part in the biggest single case of high-level corruption yet exposed by the magistrates. At its centre was alleged to be an industrialist, Raul Gardini, well-known in Italy as a yachtsman. In July he took his life with a pistol shot after learning that arrest was imminent. (SeeOBITUARIES.) Former chairman of the chemical corporation Ferruzzi, he was wanted for fraud, corruption, and bribing mainly Christian Democrat and Socialist leaders to the tune of some $80 million. According to the magistrates, the money had been paid to the leaders for their cooperation in the creation, survival, and profitable liquidation of Enimont, a giant joint venture between the state petrochemical giant ENI and private firms controlled by Gardini. It failed, burdened with debts, in 1990 after the government had duly bought out its private component, Montedison, at a price inflated by some 20%. The scheme was revealed by the imprisoned Giuseppe Garofano, a former chairman of Montedison arrested earlier in Geneva. Gardini’s suicide, the 10th since the start of Clean Hands, came during the same week that Gabriele Gagliari, former chairman of ENI, took his life in a prison cell in Milan.

By this time magistrates in Palermo had turned their attention to still-murkier matters by accusing Giulio Andreotti, the preeminent veteran of Italian politics, of collusion with the Mafia. Andreotti, seven times prime minister, Europe’s longest-serving politician, and long considered invulnerable as the shrewdest of survivors, disclosed the charges against him in March. In his statement he said that he was "very hurt" in view of harsh anti-Mafia measures enacted under his leadership. In April, Parliament’s anti-Mafia commission implied that Andreotti was the Mafia’s agent in Rome. It found that Salvatore Lima, a former Christian Democratic mayor of Palermo who was murdered in 1992, had been linked to the Mafia and that Andreotti had been Lima’s "political contact." Days later, Mafia turncoats were quoted as alleging that Mafia boss Salvatore ("Toto") Riina (see below) had once been seen planting a kiss on Andreotti. In June Andreotti came under suspicion of involvement in the murder in Rome of an "inconvenient" journalist (Carmine Pecorelli) in March 1979. Andreotti denied all the charges, questioning the reliability of charges based on the testimony of Mafia informers. A Senate committee voted in April to strip him, as senator for life, of immunity to prosecution. Few Italians found themselves astonished. Andreotti’s nickname for years had been "The Godfather."

Having lost seven of his ministers to judicial inquiry, Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, after 10 months in office, resigned in April. His successor was Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, former governor of the Bank of Italy and the first non-politician to run Italy in the 20th century. He was chosen by Pres. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro specifically to lead a transitional team of technocrats that would pick its way through a world clearly falling apart and enact reforms before the general elections that were scheduled for spring 1994.

An initial reform passed by Parliament (in March) aimed at curing the chronic instability of town councils; for the first time, citizens were to elect their mayors directly by name, and the winners would pick 60% of their town councils. In June the voters in 145 towns rejected the candidates of the most corrupt parties, and in the north they gave a triumph to the untainted Northern League of Umberto Bossi, an astute, rough-hewn demagogue with a "North-for-Northerners" slogan, a tactical hankering for secession, and a real ear for impatience over what happened to northern money in wasteful Rome. Already the country’s fourth-largest party with 80 parliamentarians after the national elections of April 1992, the League won local control of Italy’s industrial heartland by a three-to-one majority. It took over Milan and 15 other northern cities, though not Turin. The PDS did well in central Italy (Ancona and Siena, for example) and altogether gained 73 new mayors. A new left-wing anti-Mafia party, La Rete (The Network), won footholds in the south. The Christian Democrats were able to elect only nine mayors, their worst showing in 40 years, and the Socialists won only two. Thus, the traditional mold of Italian politics lay shattered. But Bossi’s success caused some concern and visions of national disruption. "The Senator," as he was called, failed to assuage anxiety when he threatened a northern tax revolt and a parliamentary walkout unless his call for early general elections was accepted.

Even more radical reform had been achieved on April 18-19 when 82.7% of voters in a referendum called for the majority of the Senate (238 senators out of 315) to be elected directly by the numbers of votes cast rather than by proportional representation. In response to another of the eight questions, voters also chose to end state funding of political parties. As intended, the referendum was interpreted as a demand for an overall change in the voting laws, in answer to which Parliament in August adopted a modified British-style electoral system for both houses. In both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, 75% of the seats would go to the winners by direct vote, while 25% would be handed out on a percentage basis. This was a reward for the past loyalty of small coalition allies, which feared extinction otherwise. The reform finally put to rest the proportional-representation system introduced after World War II essentially to keep the Communists out of power; the cost, however, had been political fragmentation and thus instability, responsible for 52 different governments since 1948.

Five terrorist bombs that went off in Rome, Milan, and Florence in May and July were widely seen as attempts to block reform by creating a climate of tension. The worst blast was on May 27 in Florence, where five people were killed and a wing of the famous Uffizi Gallery damaged. It was reopened in record time 24 days later. Nobody claimed responsibility for the bombing.

There had been gasps earlier over the arrest of Riina, described as the Mafia boss of bosses. After 23 years at large, he was picked up in January by a police patrol as he slowly drove through Palermo. Few could believe that this rather pudgy 62-year-old man with blurred speech was the most-wanted person in Italy, sought for some 50 murders, drug trafficking, and extortion. In October he was sentenced to life for the killing of two Mafia members.

Significant in foreign affairs was a clash in July between Italy on the one hand and the United States and the United Nations on the other over strategy and coordination in Somalia. While the commander of Italy’s 2,600 troops in Somalia, Gen. Bruno Loi, advocated a degree of negotiation with local warlords, the UN command sought to disarm them. The dispute became acute with calls, resisted by Italy, for General Loi’s removal. In December Italy announced that all of its troops would be withdrawn by the end of March 1994. Derek Wilson

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